


The Final Wishes of Dead Forevers

by anslin



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Sad, character introspection, implied eleventh doctor/rose tyler, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 10:33:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4825793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anslin/pseuds/anslin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You tell her you love her, repeat it over and over again despite the way your breath becomes haggard as you run faster, faster.<br/>Dimly, you are aware that she can’t hear you, but you are so determined that, this time, she knows, that you don’t care. <br/>The next time you lose her, you promise you won’t have any regrets.<br/>Thinking back on that, later, after everything has happened, you try to burn the tears from behind your eyelids and think that it was a nice idea, anyways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Final Wishes of Dead Forevers

You sit in the center of the universe, and watch as it falls away, because, for the first time in your life, you don’t know what to do.

And your life, oh your life has been a very long one.

It has not been a bad one, you don’t think. You’ve never lived someone else’s, so you wouldn’t really know, but you’re pretty sure it could all be so much worse. That’s what you tell yourself every night, when you wake up clutching at your sheets, sweat dripping down your face, alone. Somebody else has it worse than you, someone, somewhere in the vast infinity of space, is living in a hell worse than your own.

Of course, in some parallel universe, yours is the worst life, and on bad days you think that this must be that world, but not today.

Today you are indecisive, standing on the edge and just waiting to fall. You are standing at the end of the sidewalk and watching the pavement crumble away into the void. You are holding the hands of a dying goddess and trying to keep from crying out as you stare into her eyes.

Fear grins at you from the corner of your eye, and the coward in you tells you to turn around, to walk through those simple blue doors and never look back. After all, she’s dying whether you save her or not, and you, well you still have a long ways to go.

But the soldier is still so ingrained in you that you know you couldn’t even if you might like to. You have to stay, you have to fight. It’s your legacy, and it’s bitter, but right now you can only be thankful for it, because you’re not sure you could have lived with yourself, knowing that you turned away.

You make your choice, and hope, pray, that being a soldier doesn’t have to be that bad, because you know now that it might not always come to surface, but it will never go away. You try not to think about the future, because you can’t know what it is, and that scares you half to death. You do not think about setting yourself on fire, because your resolve is both iron strong and shaky at best.

You do not think, you simply do.

Today, you are not happy, nor are you sad. You are not weary, and yet there is no bounce in your step. You are in pain, but it is a pain you wouldn’t trade for the world.

You are in love, and you are burning up from the inside, but for the first time in as long as you can remember, you have no regrets. You welcome the impermanence of death easily, thinking that, even if she will leave you later, at least you have done something worthwhile.

The last thing you see is her face, and you marvel at how her tears make you hate yourself less, because she may be sad, but she is _alive_ , and somehow that is worth everything.

 

She stares at you with distrust in her eyes, like you’re a stranger, and you see so much of yourself in her that it makes you want to cry.

You are both standing in her mother’s kitchen, the day slowly melting into dusk outside the window, and in reality the only thing between you is a table, but right now it might as well be an ocean, and you can see that she isn’t going to build a boat, not for you.

Not anymore.

Her hair is shorter now, and she hides behind it, letting it fall in front of her features where she was so open before. When you first met her she was young, innocent. Now she has armor, great big walls she built around herself to keep everything that hurts out.

You taught her that, and now you wish you had also taught her that sometimes those walls can trap the hurt in just as much as it keeps it out. You can’t stand to see her suffer, you’ve proved it once before, except now she won’t let you in.

You’ve lost that, and now you’re going to lose her.

You start to panic, you’re breath coming in shorter gasps as you try to memorize everything about her. The curve of her mouth and the shape of her eyes, the way the soft contours of her face make her seem to glow when her lips pull back into that wide smile. The exact colour of every strand of hair, and the galaxies you could spend hours tracing on her skin. Constellations and supernovas mapped out onto her fragile, terribly mortal form.

She is stardust. You too are stardust, the same that you were before. You wish that she could understand that, but you know it is selfish to expect her to. She owes you nothing, and your entire world spins around her.

It’s a dangerous position to be in, and you’re not sure it’s worth the risk, but you can’t help it.

You are shaking so much you can’t stand straight, and so you lean heavily on the chair beside you, trying to pull yourself back together, and you reach for her out of reflex. Your hand hangs desperately in the gap that has formed where once you were so close, and she isn’t moving, just staring at it, and you are hyper-aware, all of a sudden, of everything that has changed about you.

For the first time, the inkling of a doubt begins to form in your mind, the thought that maybe, just maybe, you’re not the same man at all.

Then she takes your hand and everything is so right that you can’t help but smile giddily, your thoughts a whirlwind of words and emotions you can’t grasp, never mind identify.

You find you can breathe again, and the air that you suck into your lungs is the same air that she has breathed, and you feel her presence around you like a warm blanket.

This, you think, is what it’s like to be in love. You had thought that someone such as yourself could never know it, had both been disappointed by and celebrated that fact, but, in the end, it comes easier than the beating of your hearts. It’s something you know right away, and it is something you hate, because it will only hurt more now when she leaves, as she inevitably will.

You can feel her blood pumping beneath her skin, and the stench of decay that is so obvious in humans rolls off of her in waves, seeping from her pores as her body already prepares to fade away.

Such curious things. You wonder why anyone would build something for the singular purpose of watching it die.

 

A star is at it’s most beautiful the moment before it collapses in on itself, when it is a whirling mass of matter and light, the inferno before the numbing blackness. You should have known, should have seen it from the start. The universe never gives without taking something back, least of all to you. Your story is a supernova, the ending of a life, and you know that you deserve it, but you swear that she doesn’t.

There’s an ache in the hole where your hearts used to be, and it won’t go away. It spreads, eating away at everything you ever dared to dream. You can feel the sorrow branding you, imagine that fire licks at your fingertips as you stare at the pulsing lights, and wish to start all over.

You have never been a man to pray, but at that moment you get down on your knees and you plead to whatever greater power there might be above you. You beg not that you could see her one last time, but that you had never met her at all.

You are a man of reason, after all, and you know that just one more time could never be enough.

Guilt consumes you, that you would wish to erase the time you had with her. Very human of you, very unlike the pictures people paint of you. There are no fairytales, and, similarly, there are is no such thing as a good man. No matter how much you are looked up to, a man does not become a god.

You want neither immortality nor power, in any case. You have lived too long to still want those things. You have been called wise before. You would call yourself a fool.

Foolish because you let her drag you down with her, even when you knew how it would end. Foolish because you sent her away, and because she came back twice, and you should have known that it wouldn’t, couldn’t happen a third time. Foolish because you still hoped, and because you claim to have all of time and space at your fingertips, and yet you couldn’t tell her goodbye.

Lies. You feel yourself brimming with them, and an anger that burns at the back of your throat. Angry at yourself, at the universe, at her because she promised you forever, and now you are alone.

Infinity had always seemed so much longer. There’s a terrible irony in the victory of reaching its end.

You are building a fortress around yourself, letting walls of stone and cold hatred smother you, and you vow that you will never let anyone in ever again. You can’t imagine that you could again. She took your hearts with her, and you selfishly hope that, impossibly far away, she covets them, because they are the only ones you have to give.

You whisper that you are sorry, so, _so_ , sorry, to an empty room, and let the silence drown you.

 

Even across the darkened street, you can see the hopeful anguish in her eyes, the doubt and the joy burning there, and yet you can’t bring yourself to believe that she is real. You have seen her ghost so many times now, watched her disappear just before your fingertips can brush her cheek, that you don’t dare think anything else. You can’t afford to, doing so might just be the one thing it takes to break you at last.

And yet, you can’t help grin that stretches your face anymore than you can defy the magnetic pull that has you running toward her, arms pumping as your legs strain to move faster than they can. She is running too, and please, let this not end like it has all those times before. Please let her still be there when you reach for her.

It has been so long since you’ve held her hand, you’ve forgotten what it feels like, the way it fits in your own. It has been the source of your nightmares since you lost her, that business of forgetting.

You can’t help but notice that while the good memories are as easily caught as wisps of smoke, the bad ones stay like wine stains on a white tablecloth. Dark, ugly, impossible to avoid.

It feels, at times, as though you were built to be hurt.

You tell her you love her, repeat it over and over again despite the way your breath becomes haggard as you run faster, faster.

Dimly, you are aware that she can’t hear you, but you are so determined that, this time, she knows, that you don’t care.

The next time you lose her, you promise you won’t have any regrets.

Thinking back on that, later, after everything has happened, you try to burn the tears from behind your eyelids and think that it was a nice idea, anyways.

 

You are on fire again, burning up from the inside, and there is only pain to keep you company now. Some people say that, when you die, you see your life flash before your eyes. You know they are wrong of course, death is a messy agony, and you are thankful, because you don’t think you could bear it all again.

You see her again, before you go. Seared into your mind's eye, and the last thing you think is neither dignified nor romantic. It is the last plea of a desperate man.

_Please let me go._

It isn’t granted.


End file.
